“Feel free.” I smile back. “She has a completely unblemished image. People adore her. The town is practically owned by her. She donates to every cause. I’ve never seen someone so active in the autism community. Do you know they even had ponies at their fundraiser last year?”
Every year, she puts together a weeklong series of entertaining community events to raise awareness for autism. They do all kinds of fun things for kids and their families—carnival games, face painting, and fun contests. They always do a feature on WDYM on opening night to kick it off.
“I believe it. A while back they had a full-blown circus.” He snorts.
“We must’ve missed that year,” I say before turning my attention to the reason I called him over so late. “I couldn’t find anything telling online, but all of my searching led me to take another look at the reports Genevieve gave us on Mason, and this time through, I found some things I missed before.” I pause a beat so I don’t get ahead of myself and unload a bunch of clinical jargon on him. “I’ve gone through all of Mason’s tests of intellectual functioning that he’s taken over the years, and they’re almost identical scores. That seems like something you would want when you’re testing a kid, and to a certain extent, it is. You want scores to be close to each other and fall within a particular range, but there should be some degree of variability on the scores because of the degree of variability inherent in the test. You know, like how the kid’s feeling that day, the testing situation, how hungry they are . . . things like that. A score of a 98 and a 92 is still in the same range. It gives you the same information. That’s why we have the ranges. But to get the exact same score? That’s almost impossible to do by chance.”
He wrinkles his forehead. “I’m not following you. You can’t get the same score?”
“Not that close across five different tests taken at five different time periods.” I shake my head. “Three of his full scale IQ scores are exact, but they’re all within one point of each other.”
“I don’t understand. How would something like that even work?”
“I think Mason was coached on how to fail the tests. What things he needed to get right versus what he needed to get wrong in order to look a certain way on them, and to do that, you’d have to fail in a particular order, since all the tests are standardized. Basically, how to fail the test to meet a specific diagnosis.” I still can’t believe someone would do that. I whip open my laptop and pull up his testing protocols from block design. This is the easiest one for the untrained eye to see. I angle my computer toward him so he can see the screen too.
“Okay, so for this test, the examiner builds a design with different colored blocks, and then the kid has to build the same design with their blocks.” I point to the screen. “Do you see what he made?” I give him time to take it in before scrolling to the next block-design test. “This test was given two years later at White Memorial. Look at the mistakes here.” Another second to take it all in, then the next one. “And six months later, here.” I stop scrolling and make eye contact. “Every intelligence test that he’s taken has the exact same answers. His IQ score is almost identical on every test. And the tests are timed.” I almost forgot to mention it. How could I omit something so critical? “He takes the same amount of time to answer too. Again, that’s almost statistically impossible to do on your own.”
“Seems pretty smart for someone with a mental age of four.” He sits up straighter in his chair, holding his coffee out in front of him. He’s finally catching on, but that’s only part of the discovery.
“It’s brilliant is what it is.” I grin with pride to have uncovered it on my own. “I’ve never seen anyone do it before. I don’t know why anyone would. But yeah, it’s not at a four-year-old’s level because that’s not where he’s at. If this is true, then who knows about all of the other stuff.”
He sits there for a few minutes, deep in thought. “Why would someone want to make a child look like they had intellectual impairments if they didn’t?”
“I don’t know.” I shake my head in bewilderment. “It doesn’t make any sense to me. I’ve never seen anything like it. Never. And I’ve given hundreds, maybe even thousands, of cognitive tests over the years.”
“So he’s not intellectually disabled?” Skepticism lines his voice.
“Who knows.” I shrug my shoulders with my hands up. “It’s impossible to know based on these tests.”
“What about his autism? There’s no way for anyone to do that with his autism, right? Isn’t there a blood test for it?”
“There’s no blood test or brain scan to diagnose autism spectrum disorder. It doesn’t work that way. We make the diagnosis based on the presence or absence of certain behaviors. That’s really all the diagnosis is—the presence or absence of a group of behaviors. You could train those behaviors if you wanted to, even though I have no idea why someone would.”
“What do you mean?”
“Same as you’d teach them anything else,” I explain, but he looks just as lost. “For example, I lead groups where I teach social skills to kids with autism spectrum disorder, and one of the skills we work on is eye contact. Kids with ASD usually have a hard time with it.” I stay away from the traditional forms of applied behavioral analysis and apply a more flexible approach in my groups. I’m continually striving to treat kids with autism as naturally different instead of abnormal people needing to be fixed. I don’t waste time explaining that to Detective Layne, though. I focus on what’s important to the case. “For the kids who are comfortable making eye contact, we practice how to make appropriate eye contact, where to look, and when to look away. Things like that. Then there are other kids where direct eye contact is too anxiety producing, so I teach them to focus on the blank spot between a person’s eyes because it looks like they’re making eye contact and doesn’t make them so nervous. In the same way that I do that, you could do the opposite.”